Tumbledown Farmer's Blog

Voluntary Simplicity

2008-07-22T07:29:00.001-07:00

Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich (Revised edition)

The first edition of this book was published in 1981 and it is as relevant today as it was in the decade of the "Bonfire of the Vanities." We hardly lead simpler lives today than we did then, even with the high price of gas and the sudden renewal of interest in "stay-cations" as opposed to vacations. While I agree with the basic premise that we should live deliberate, intentional, purposeful, simple lives--I wanted something more than the philosophical generalizing that I found in the book. Maybe it is me; maybe it is my particular situation--but I was looking for something more from a book with such a sterling reputation. While it is true that "the particular expression of simplicity is a personal matter," it isn't very helpful for the creation of a simple life of my own just to say so. I want many examples of simple lives well lived, not just generalizations about the imperative to live simply. I suspect, even with this "personal matter," that we can be more specific. I think a simple life is by definition agrarian and therefore I find much better descriptions (and simpler, with less philosophical gobbledygook) of such a life in the works of Wendell Berry and Gene Logsdon. This book, now something of a cult classic and inspiration for others (you'll see it in many a bibliography, so it is something you "should" read), is worth the time if you can find it, and if you can find the book in the library. I don't intend to purchase a copy for myself, but I may stand in line at the library to recall it and read it again in the future--and maybe then I'll find something more to like.

The Unforeseen Wilderness, Spoiled

2008-06-23T17:47:00.001-07:00

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Originally uploaded by Tumbledown Farmer

In my review of the Unforeseen Wilderness by Wendell Berry, I mentioned the entrance to Clifty Falls and the smoke stacks that made havoc of our lungs while we were there. The weather kept the clouds socked in low to the ground and the prevailing wind was straight from the stacks into the gorge. Yuck!

The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge

2008-06-23T14:19:00.001-07:00

The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge, by Wendell Berry with photos by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Shoemaker & Hoard, 1991.

I read this book back in April while on Spring Break with the family at Clifty Falls State Park (YouTube video of Clifty Falls) just west of Madison, Indiana. The book was a good and constant companion to the rocky cliffs, steep climbs, winding trails and waterfalls of the springtime park. The natural beauty accompanied by the words of Wendell Berry was a much needed respite. The book has the high quality writing that I've come to expect of Wendell Berry, not his best work by far, but appropriate to the physical setting and as always provocative in the best sort of way. The book was written to "save Kentucky's Red River Gorge from destruction"--i.e., to prevent the damming of the river and the drowning of the gorge--and that utilitarian motive (having been written for a useful purpose) casts a shadow and adds an artifice to the literary work that is rarely seen in Berry's poetry and fiction. That and the distance the book travels from Berry's usual topic--good land poorly farmed--makes for some dis-ease, at least for this reader.

Despite the minor criticism (that the book, though well suited to what it is, isn't what I had hoped or even as good as the greatest of Berry's works), the book offers descriptions and photos of the Red River Gorge that show it at its best (though I have never seen it). I imagine from Meatyard's photos and Berry's prose that it is the same sort of place that Clifty Falls once was, before Clifty Falls became overrun by the tourism (I was one of the tourists) that comes with the development of a place for "recreation," the establishment of a lodge and "easy trails" and paved roads along the gorge. Clifty Falls also suffers from having a coal fired power plant at its entrance, the stacks of which obscure the view and the smoke from which is enough to make even a healthy lung wheeze. (See the next post for the view from a cell phone camera.)

It is when the beautiful simplicity of the prose matches the austerity of what is described, the frugality of the words matching the extravagance of the "trout lilies, rue anemones, trailing arbutus" that Berry is at his finest. Those--and the places where he skewers the tourist-eye-view, regrets both the organizations that oppose and defend the dam, and that would destroy and preserve the gorge, and does battle with the likes of the mindset of the Army Corps of Engineers--are that places where the Wendell Berry we appreciate most comes into view.

Not the best book in the Berry bibliography. If you've never read Berry, don't start with this book. But if you are taking a tourist trip to see a "natural wonder" some day soon, pack this little reminder of sanity along. Oh the difference he'll make in the way you view the rocks and trees!

Salad Days!

2008-05-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

We are eating high off the hog here at Tumbledown Farm.

From Cooking and E…

These May days are full of anticipation. About the only thing that hits the plate directly from the garden at the moment is lettuce.

From Broccoli

[Photo: A few mini-heads of Romain Lettuce / Paris White Cos sitting mid-way down a row of broccoli. Eating the whole bunch just before it forms the distinctive Romain lettuce center will give you a good substitute for iceberg. My family will not eat mesculun or any spring leaf lettuce mix because “it is bitter and it doesn’t crunch.” So, we have to plant what they’ll eat!]

Maybe a few baby onions (or scallions) can be thrown in for good measure, but anything that did not over-winter or get a head start inside under the lights is still too small to eat!

From Onions

(Waiting, waiting, waiting for those first beets, radishes, some spinach, kale, kohlrabi, and the like.) Sometime later this month we’ll have more than we can eat. For now, though, we dine on a little bit of lettuce and onions. Next year I’ll learn how to use hoop supported row covers to begin planting about 10 days earlier. I want to be feasting from the garden by the first week of May!

Of course, there is always a little asparagus volunteering here and there. [The birds plant it for us. Got some new this year, sprouting beside the privet someone unwitting planted as an ornamental.]
And we’re eating some rhubarb.

From Rhubarb

This year I paid $9 at Menard’s for 3 sets of 3 very dead looking rhubarb roots (9 altogether…that’s $1/root by my calculation) on the clearance shelf on the very last day they would sell it. I figured since Gurneys and the other mail order places charge $7.95 per root plus shipping, if even two of the roots showed signs of life I would be ahead. …and just look what happened!

From Rhubarb

The bacon was purchased at regular (inflated) market prices. (Maybe with just an acre more?…) But the free-range eggs for our lunch-time omelet were provided by a friend. Sometimes it just pays to be a Tumbledown Farmer!

Tumbledown Farm

Planting an Urban Farm: The Time Is Here

2008-03-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

There has been an unrelenting flood of news about land prices lately–moving in opposite directions, up and down at the same time–the momentum and tempo of which has been steadily increasing:

1) Foreclosures and property abandonment in cities and suburbs are at an all time high, while prices for development property/lots and single-family housing are falling (Targeted: Housing Blight ; City to develop own plan to revive neighborhoods).

2) The value of farmland is also at an all time high (largest one-year jump in 30 years, Farmland prices continue to rise; from $3500 to $4000 per acre in the past two years, Grain boom may spark rural revival; Rising prices will boost state’s economy, but consumers will have to pay more for goods).

At the same time that the city is asking “What can we do with all those abandoned homes?” (Olgen Williams, Deputy Mayor for Neighborhoods, to Star reporter Ted Evanoff), farmers are looking for land to buy or rent. As the NYTimes reports, there is big competition for new farm acreage at a time when the rest of the economy seems to be in a tail spin: “[a]t a moment when much of the country is contemplating recession, farmers are flourishing.” The 7000 foreclosures and abandonments in the city of Indianapolis alone are resulting in decreased tax base, a shortage of affordable housing (ironically), health and safety issues, crime and squatting. It seems to me that a better quality of life in city neighborhoods could be had by turning abandoned property into farmland and gardens. The good news is that agribusiness will not be able to even park, much less use, the John Deere 630T, 530 hp, with its 330 gallon fuel tank, on a lot of .1 or .3 acres. Using those city lots for urban farms and gardens would require shovels, hoes, rakes and other sustainable equipment. With “inputs” (chemical fertilizers) doubling in cost this past year, there would probably be less temptation to overuse those too.

I think the confluence of these two economic forces presents an opportunity for the niche urban micro farm.

It seems that I am not alone in thinking this is a good solution to some of our most intractable problems. Purdue Extension-Marion County announced in January that it had received a $10,000 grant from the Efroymson Fund, a CICF fund, for a pilot Urban Farm Project. In addition to problems of urban blight, The Urban Farm Project will address food insecurity on the Indianapolis near-east side. (Not far from Tumbledown Farm.) The community that this urban farm project will serve lost its only neighborhood full-service grocery store in the spring of 2007. Area food pantries have been stretched beyond their limit to respond. (As is also the case in Johnson county.) According to the extension newsletter, The Urban Farm Project “will help provide fresh produce by planting chemical-free urban gardens on two or three vacant neareastside lots. The produce generated from these lot gardens will be donated to a nearby food pantry for distribution to the community’s needy.” At the same time, the project “will also be an apprenticeship program for local high school students.” What a combination! (For more info about the Indy Urban Farm, contact Matthew Jose, Urban Garden Program Asst.)

It seems to me that this sort of model might also work in the “for-profit” world. Muhammad Yunus, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, may show us the way with his banker-to-the-poor ideas about doing good by doing well in a distributed, small-scale way.

With food prices rising because of the spike in the cost of agribusiness commodities, I have been thinking about expanding Tumbledown Farm, ever so slightly. There is a little 40X136 lot (oh, about .13 acres, not enough for the big guys to notice, return on investment too small and too slow) about 9 miles from us that is listed with MIBOR for $2500. I bet it could be had for $2,000 in cash, and in three years could be producing $500 per year in filberts. A soil test, a little manual labor, and all the hazelnuts you can eat. (Or, for a little more time and labor, strawberries or raspberries, or vegetables of all sorts.)

What think you? Time for an urban micro farm? Want a share in this little agricultural and sociological experiment?

Tumbledown Farm

The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living

2008-02-15T07:44:00.000-08:00

The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living. Schocken Books, Inc., 1989.

This book is a combination of Living the Good Life (1954, 1970, 1982) and Continuing the Good Life (1979), with a new introduction by Helen Nearing. The first book is an accounting for 20 years (from 1932) lived in the backwoods of Vermont. The second book (bound in this instance together with the first) is an accounting from 1952 on of a similar experiment in living on a farm in Harborside, Maine (Cape Rosier). It is clear from the beginning that these are not "simple folk" forced into a simpler life of necessity (at least not physical necessity), but a couple who are seeking together a way of removing themselves from the larger society marked by World War and a rise in fascism to practice pacifism, vegetarianism, and collectivism. These are "professors" out to teach as much as they are to live well. They sought a life that would be 50% subsistence provision of their needs directly through their own physical "labor" and 50% "leisure" ("research, travelling, writing, speaking and teaching"). Obviously, their goals were more complicated than mine. I am simply interested in the parts of their experiment that show The Good Life to be also the sustainable, small-scale life, by which I mean something more like Duane Elgin's voluntary simplicity. (Voluntary Simplicity, Revised Edition: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich) I am interested in their goal to eat from the work of their own hands, and to escape the traps of economic complicity in a high-consumption culture. I am less interested in the Nearings' social experiment (the collectivism), and more interested in their vegetable garden. My life is such that I'll not be able to escape the suburban landscape any time soon, so I'll not have the Nearings' 65 acres with which to experiment in living the good life. And even if I could, I would do it differently. The Nearings didn't keep animals for any purpose, especially not for eating, so I am loathe to call what they did traditional, small-scale farming. But I am interested in their techniques for subsistence "farming" without the use of chemical fertilizers or animals and animal products. (What?! No manure? Is it really possible to "improve" the soil without chemicals or animal manures?)

Should I ever be in the position to start from scratch on new land, I will certainly consult their chapters on building a house. And already, I have benefitted from their advice for extending the gardening year and for preserving garden produce. And almost they have persuaded me that vegetarianism is the way to go. Perhaps we should say that my farm will be less animal-intensive and animal centric for having read their work. But their chapters on living in community do little for me. I wonder whether they were simply too "serious" and "intentional" to recognize the community that already exists in churches, civic organizations, gardening organizations and the like. It seems to me that what they desired in the way of community was too confining, certainly for free-spirited Vermonters, but for anyone with a sense of individuality and independence. Though I do not go in for total withdrawal from society and complete self-sufficiency (undesirable and impossible), I do think that the indepence of spirit that marks citizens of the U.S. is a good thing that can be encouraged for the sake of many of the ideals that the Nearings embrace for living the good life.

In short, I recommend the book for its chapters on homestead buildings and construction, for its sections on gardening and diet, and for its overall spirit of voluntary living, its voluntary simplicity.

Gardening Economy and Non-Cooperation

2008-02-11T13:10:00.000-08:00

A Gardening Economy: The Cost of Non-Cooperation

I’ve been reading a little too much of Mahatma Gandhi lately, especially his Freedom’s Battle: Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation, which is available on the Kindle for $.99 (free on the internet). It struck me as I read again Gandhi’s advocacy of “non-cooperation” as an alternative to surrender or complicity, that non-cooperation may be our best and only option against the multinational agricultural corporations, the behemoth colonial powers of our day. Agribusiness requires our cooperation to survive. ADM and the others require our cooperation to maintain their near monopoly status. Their power is truly dependent on our continuous cooperation with them in the purchase of processed foods.

And unless I’m very much mistaken, gardening is truly our most natural and most effective expedient for refusing to maintain their rule. We must simply refuse our cooperation; withdraw it. We can start by reducing or eliminating processed foods from our diet and buying whole foods from local farmers. Some fear that, if we were to succeed (and they very much doubt that we will), this would produce the total collapse of the farm economy. But as Gandhi predicted of Indian self-government, long before there could be a total collapse, we would have forged strong ties with local producers and robust local means of distribution. Others protest that this sort of non-cooperation is a negative path, that it will destroy the cheap food on which our high standard of living is based. But, as Gandhi pointed out, non-cooperation with the multinational corporation means greater cooperation among ourselves and “greater mutual dependence.”

So, what will non-cooperation cost me this year? Besides some time and labor, it has already cost $77.20. (Watch the garden budget this year to see what I purchase and what the garden yields are. We’ll weigh everything as we harvest and record the value of the produce by comparison to the cost of fruit and vegetables at the local Meier Supermarket.)

Here’s what we’ve bought so far: Goliath Hybrid Pepper Seed (pkt-30, $2.60), Big Beef Hybrid Tomato Seed (pkt-30, $2.10), Early Girl Hybrid Tomato Seed (pkt-30, $2.20), Besweet 2020 Edible Soybean Seed (pkt-2 oz., $1.95), Red Ace Hybrid Beet Seed (pkt-300, $1.90), Super Blend Hybrid Broccoli Seed (pkt-200, $1.80, 33% each of Liberty, Pirate, and Major), Alchiban Hybrid Eggplant Seed (pkt-30, $2.00), Sweet Basil Seed (pkt-100, $1.50, Italian Large Leaf Basil), Long Standing Cilantro or Coriander Seed (pkt-100, $1.50), Kossak Giant Hybrid Kohlrabi Seed (pkt-50, $2.25), Paris White Cos Lettuce Seed (pkt-5 grams, $1.55, Romaine Lettuce), Evergreen Bunching Scallions Seed (pkt-250, $1.55, White Bunching Onion), Hungarian Yellow Wax Pepper Seed (pkt-25, $1.55, Hot Banana Pepper), Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach Seed (pkt-7 grams, $1.50), Dwarf American Hazelnut Plant (4 plants, $18.50), Sparkle Strawberry (25 plants, $8.75), Nugget Hops Plant (1 plant, $8.25), Thuricide (8 oz concentrate, $8.25, Bacillus thuringiensis var. kurstaki), Early Bird Garden Tomato Seed (pkt-25, $0.00), Early Bird Garden Pea Seed (pkt-1 oz, $0.00, medium-vined garden pea variety), Early Bird Garden Cucumber Seed (pkt-25, $0.00, Fancy Green Slicer), Early Bird Garden Bean (pkt-1 oz, $0.00), Early Bird Garden Sweet Corn (pkt-1 oz., $0.00, hybrid yellow sweet). The last few, the ones labeled “early bird,” are “experimental varieties” included in the R.H. Shumway’s shipment as a reward for ordering early and ordering more than a minimal number of items. This year I bought the whole lot from Shumway. I’ll report later how their seeds and plants performed. Shipping was $7.50.

A few of these items require explanation. First, the Thuricide. I hate to put any sort of pesticide on the garden, but Bt appears to be, by every account, organic and environmentally friendly.

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It has a very narrow use–the destruction of cabbage moth caterpillars–and will be used by me only to take care of extreme cases, where total vegetable loss is a possibility. Think I’m kidding? Look at the photos below of my first attempt a few years back to grow broccoli. And our family loves broccoli!

Another oddity is the hops plant. With the hops I intend to make my own dried yeast for bread baking. And, of course, Hazelnuts (or Filberts) are about the only nuts that can be grown on a small suburban lot and still allow room for all the strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries and a vegetable garden! So, stay tuned, we have a lot of growing to do on this non-cooperative micro-farm in 2008!

Tumbledown Farm

Farming for Self-Sufficiency: Independence on a Five-Acre Farm

2008-02-01T12:40:00.000-08:00

Farming for Self-Sufficiency Independence on a 5 Acre Farm, John and Sally Seymour (Introduction by Mildred Loomis, The School of Living, Freeland, Maryland). Schocken Books, NY 1973.

"Give any man, anywhere in the world, his fair share of earth's surface, and--if he survives one harvest--he and family need never be hungry again." (p. 14)

In 1973, only seven years after I was born, already the basic structural problems for early 21st century society from industrial farming had been mostly identified and articulated: "depletion and erosion and disease were resulting from the chemical-pesticide regime and the commercial, mono-crop agriculture, sometimes called agri-business." (p. 2) As Loomis says, the Seymours offer a report on twenty years of living differently, organically and sustainably, locally, what "in the 1920s, Ralph Borsodis had christened 'modern homesteading.'" (p. 12) The strength of the book is the depth of experience shared in it; there is a "lived-with" feel, in which the rougher bumps and hard edges of life have been worn down and softened by apprenticeship and long practice, so that knowledge and experience have yielded a weathered wisdom. There is much of common sense, age, and hard work here, the results of which are freely and graciously shared with good humor.

The writing is strong. Chapter titles are mostly simple, one-word affairs: "Horse," "Cow," "Pig," and the like. What the internet now has the potential to provide--a resource for reporting and exchange of information with others who are engaged in a similar way of living--was once the purview of journals and newspapers and paper journals like The Interpreter and books like this one by the Seymours. The problem with paper publishing is its limited availability. And the problem with a book is that it carries a single perspective and limited experience, however relevant and important that particular perspective may be. It takes many books of this sort to provide a truly ample view of the self-sufficient life as it might be lived in suburban central Indiana, for example. But the Seymours' books are out of print, available only at the library or via used book sales at Amazon and the like. The good news is that there is an explosion of such writing and sharing going on now in blogs, on websites, and via sharing of online videos (with gardening and farming "how to's"); it merely needs some coordination and careful vetting to be more useful. I suspect that we are on the verge of forming a network of small-scale, diversified, suburban "experiment stations," designing and carrying out tests, and reporting results. Together we can discover what works, what is sustainable, and what flops.

Most of all, the book is a guide book, a "how-to-live-on-the-land" book. As such, it offers complete instructions for every crop and livestock project imaginable (and some that aren't imaginable for people with an acre or less in the suburbs)--and offers recipes for cooking and preserving the food produced on the farm. There are some difficulties for the U.S./North American reader caused mainly by the difference in locale. The Seymours were British farmers, meaning that there are climatic, historical, social, and legal (then U.K., now EU) differences on the two sides of the pond. ...not to mention linguistic differences, especially in using the Queen's English. It is not insignificant that John Seymour had lived in both African and Indian villages at one time or another. Seymour draws on this cross-cultural experience to provide context for a "post-industrial self-sufficiency." What he intends is a partial self-sufficiency. John and Sally both worked for cash (but only a little cash) , thus not contributing much to "the development of the atom bomb," etc. I think this taking of matters into one's own life and hands is necessary in a world when it is so difficult to have a meaningful impact as an individual on such things as the 2007 Farm Bill. It is better to plant and grow and eat your own vegetables--and to buy them from local farmers' markets--than to wait for the Farm Bill to stop subsidizing industrial corn and soybean production. Seymour suggests that for periods of time, for two years perhaps, and with a severely restricted diet (all beans all the time!) one could, like Thoreau at Walden, approach self-sufficiency more nearly even than the Seymours or the Nearings or others of the more recent vintage of self-reliant individuals and couples.

Partly, the case for self-sufficiency is one of anticipated necessity. (See the 1970s Resources and Men, W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco; National Academy of Science and National Research Council of the U.S.) Fossil fuels will eventually be used up. Today we might add that Global Warming will catch up with us. But the case for self-sufficiency is also a case for enjoying life. It is enjoyable and rewarding and the diversity it enforces on the production of what we eat is more interesting and less boring--or can be--than industrial corn and soybeans (or Thoreau's all-bean diet). For the purpose of the book, it is clear that for the Seymours and their children, a "fair share of the earth's surface" was five acres for a family of six. Another part of self-sufficiency, even on as many as five acres, is managing one's affairs carefully. There are also, obviously, dietary restrictions. For example, in Indiana it will mean eating a substantial number of root crops in the winter. It wouldn't necessarily mean that in California.

There were some disappointments in the book for me. For example, Cobbett (a favorite of Seymour) says that you can keep a cow alive and productive on half an acre with Swedish turnips and cabbages--but Seymour recommends two acres per cow. I guess that rules me out of the cow business--even if the neighborhood association would grant me the livestock exception. And it is somewhat ironic in a book on self-sufficiency to find--as in books by the Nearings and others of similar genre--the nearly universal praise and high veneration of community. The desired community is defined usually as like-minded neighbors living in a similar manner. Of course I live in a community of like-minded neighbors, they just aren't minds like mine. There is too little land (1/2 acre or less usually) in a suburban lot and the community is like-minded in its consumerist focus, a way of living that is diametrically opposed to the values of self-sufficiency.

There are lots of things that can't be learnt from books or web sites, and plowing with a horse is one of them, but Seymour recommends a tome anyway. (George Ewart Evans, "The Horse in the Furrow," Faber and Faber) But, of course, it will be a blue moon--and hades frozen over besides--before I get a horse. Seymour points out the difficulty of finding implements for sale for horse plowing and harness for sale. In this country it is good to start your search in Amish country, where you'll have not only the opportunity to buy but also the opportunity to observe and learn.

Perhaps my favorite recipe, and one I'll try this summer (stay tuned to the website and Tumbledown Farmer's Blog) is the one for dried yeast. The yeast is used to make either bread or beer and appears on p. 148.

3 oz. hops
3 1/2 lbs rye flour
7 lbs corn or barley meal
1 gallon water

"Rub the hops and boil them in the water for half an hour. Strain. Stir in rye flour, then corn or barley meal. Knead and roll out very thin. Cut into circles with a tumbler and leave to dry hard in the sun. Wild yeast will infect the biscuits. To use it, crumble a biscuit and soak in warm water with sugar and salt in it and next day use as yeast."

Already familiar with the Seymour book? Why not try this one?

Planning the 2008 Garden

2008-01-23T13:20:00.000-08:00

It appears that I’ll be a Master Gardener eventually. But for now, I’m just an intern, donating the occasional day to worthy gardening causes and learning as I volunteer about other people’s garden questions in a hands-on, dirt-turning setting, but with the help of those who have been at this much longer. At any rate, I passed my MG test back in December, so I guess that means I can mostly be trusted not to kill too many plants.

But enough of all that. Time’s-a-wasting, and the 2008 gardening catalogs are on the table and I’m anxious to use some of what I’ve learned. It’s time to plan the 2008 garden! Stay tuned for the next few weeks and I’ll tell you what I ordered and why…and what it cost and I’ll post the photos as the seeds begin to sprout. You may notice this year that I’ve gone mostly for hybrids with a few heirlooms to supplement the lot, rather than plant all heirlooms. Why? Because I’ve begun to think that Integrated Pest Management (IPM) makes a heck of a lot of sense. That doesn’t mean that I’ll begin using a lot of chemical pesticides or go gangbusters with chemical fertilizers; it just means that I’ll pay attention to the disease resistance of some hybrids as one of many tools to use in a balanced way in the garden. We’ll see how it goes and I’ll let you know what I use and when and most importantly WHY and what precautions I’ve taken. And we’ll see whether you think I’ve jumped on the industrial production, super-veggy bandwagon.

I’ll not stop using organic methods, especially composting and crop rotation and the like. These just make sense. In fact, the research just keeps getting stronger. Take my strawberry patch, for example. I’ve been using a rotation for several years that was suggested by Gene Logsdon that includes corn in the rotation. However, this year I’ve discovered that broccoli planted in the rotation prior to strawberries leaves a natural fungicide (glucosinolate) that keeps verticillium in check. (Krishna Subbarao, University of California, plant pathologist; see Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew, Samuel Fromartz)

Our family loves broccoli, so guess what we’ll plant instead of corn in that strawberry rotation for 2008? It never hurts to try a little experimenting of our own, especially the edible kind.

While you are planning your own garden, check out our new Indianapolis Gardening Calendar. I think you’ll like it.

Tumbledown Farm

The Gardener's Guide to Better Soil

2007-11-25T14:01:00.000-08:00

The Gardener's Guide to Better Soil by Gene Logsdon and the editors of Organic Gardening and Farming. 1975. Rodale Press.

The thing is, the most important thing to know about a book is whether the author writes well. That goes double for non-fiction writing. I really don't care whether Mr. Logsdon knows how to garden if he doesn't know how to write. Thankfully, he knows how to do both well. And the book holds up well for its age, written in the 1970s, during the last oil (and chemical fertilizer) crisis. While most of us conveniently forgot for the intervening 30 years about the limits of fossil fuels, a small cadre of organic gardeners and farmers continued to ask how to produce food in sufficient quality and quantity when (not if) the oil runs out.

Logsdon's genius for spinning a yarn is evident on nearly every page. The book contains everything a gardener would ever want to know about the soil, and then some. But it also drops other gems of gardening knowledge and lore along the way. For example, chapter 2 begins with a "conversation" between two gardeners on a road trip and continues with a recommendation for (and description of) a cross-country "Soilwatching Trip" from the Pine Barrens to the mountains and deserts of the West. And the itinerary includes a short course in the basics: soil types, soil maps, soil texture, soil tests, nutrients (N-P-K), micronutrients, organic matter, humus, drainage, pH, mulching, composting, organic fertilizers, and green manures. And somewhere along the way, Logsdon finds the time to talk about buying good farmland and to explain such gardening essentials as crop rotation, even offering examples of useful rotations and gardening tool recommendations.

There are a few caveats. One is that the dichotomy between "chemical" and "organic" fertilizers is too starkly drawn. The gardener worthy the name will neither dump chemicals willy-nilly on the garden nor avoid them altogether. Chemical fertilizers will have their place in growing vegetables so long as they are inexpensively available. (That they will not be available indefinitely is a reason to know and begin to use the alternatives.) Another example is Logsdon's east-Ohio centric vision of farming and gardening. When he approves without reservation most things that raise the pH of the soil, it is fairly clear that he has usually gardened and farmed an acid soil. Gardeners in central Indiana will want to approach with caution any soil emendation that raises a pH that is probably already too high for optimum plant growth. But these are really quibbles with a great literary romp through what every gardener should know about the ground under his feet.

Master Gardener Class Begins

2007-09-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

Is it possible to turn a Tumbledown Farmer into a Master Gardener? I guess we’ll find out.

Tumbledown paid his $95 and is taking his chances. This past Tuesday, he spent all day in class at Purdue Extension-Marion County learning all he could about “plant science” and “horticulture” and “entomology” and “insect pests” and “weeds.” We began class with a pretest, which Tumbledown almost certainly flunked. The day then followed with lecture, aided by PowerPoint outline, photos, and physical examples (field samples). So far the experience is both exhilarating and daunting. If you enjoyed High School biology and wanted to go deeper, and if you love gardening, this may be the place for you. Tumbledown will keep you posted about what he’s learning and how it is going. If there are veteran Master Gardeners out there who would like to share their advice and experiences with Tumbledown readers, just register with the blog (see the link on the side bar) and leave us a comment. Share a note of encouragement or a note of caution, whichever fits.

Wondering what the Master Gardener Program is all about? Check out the Purdue Extension-Marion County Master Gardener page. Have a gardening question? E-mail it for an answer to the Master Gardeners who are standing by at marionmg@purdue.edu. Or call 317-275-9292.

There is a moral dilemma for Tumbledown, of course, given his natural suspicion of government programs and industrial agriculture (pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and the like). It is clear from day one (and from the agreement potential Master Gardeners are required to sign in order to enroll) that the course will include information about the proper use of pesticides and fertilizers, and to provide that information at the conclusion of the course to those who ask questions about how to garden.

Tumbledown has decided that he will take the Master Gardener course with his eyes wide open, hoping to discern where the information provided by the Extension Service educator can be used within the context of traditional (late 19th, early 20th century), diversified, sustainable small farms and gardens. He’ll take notes and report about those aspects of the course that tend to support and exhibit indebtedness to industrial agriculture and those that tend to support local, small farms.

Already it is possible to see some of the biases that so annoy Gene Logsdon and Wendell Berry. For example, the whole program falls under the rubric “Consumer Horticulture” (the only recognized alternative being “Commercial Agriculture”). Commercial ag produces; consumer ag consumes. Thus the economic engine revs. Still, the overall impression after the first day is of an Extension program with significant balance, able to hear and respond to the criticisms that have been leveled at it for some time. Not always altogether fair in its assessment of some “traditional wisdom,” but less strident in its opposition, and more willing to consider “organic” and biological controls than Tumbledown thought the purveyors of un-sustainable industrial agriculture might be.

Tumbledown will be listening to hear whether the things being taught are able to be fit into an emphasis on “genetic diversity, local adaptation, and conservation of energy.” (Berry, The Way of Ignorance) Tumbledown will be listening, in short, to improve his bottom line (the improvement of his garden.

Tumbledown Farm

Human Limits and Unlimited Hubris

2007-09-24T17:29:00.000-07:00

Wendell Berry. The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. (contributions by Daniel Kemmis and Courtney White)

Collections of essays are never as tightly constructed or coherent as a reader might wish, but this is one of those rare cases--and rare authors--for which one can truly say it does not matter. The subject of human limits--and our need to recognize and honor those limits--is of such importance and so permeates every essay in the book that the reader forgives what disjunctions do occur between individual essays. There is not a linear progression from beginning to end, but in the end who cares. The subject has been addressed thoughtfully from many directions.

Part I is the least satisfying section of the book. It is also the most political (in the stupid sense of that word), but short enough to be tolerable. Berry has written more and better about "Contempt for Small Places" and "Rugged Individualism." Tumbledown was gratified to see Berry endorse the growth of farmers markets, community supported agriculture (CSAs), sustainable agriculture, Slow Food (using all of the "movement" monikers) and the like as an alternative to "competing on the global market" and as an indicator that indeed "We Have Begun." The pace picks up toward the end of this section with one good (Compromise, Hell!) and one better ("Charlie Fisher") essay. The latter, the story of a man logging and using horses to do it, is vintage Berry.

Part II is the reason to buy the book, 98 work-horse pages in 8 little essays. The first, "Imagination in Place," tells us that Berry is a farmer-writer and a writer-farmer, and that both vocations are shaped by (and shape) the land on which he lives. A wondrously brief bibliography (library) illustrates the shape of Berry's "philosophy" of farming:

F. H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan

Sir Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (Special Rodale Press Edition)

Sir Albert Howard, The Soil And Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (Culture of the Land: A Series in the New Agrarianism)

J. Russel Smith, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture (Conservation Classics)

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

If these have influenced Berry's thoughts, you can bet they'll be on Tumbledown's shelf and on his nightstand soon. How better to understand Berry's influence on my own thoughts than to read his sources (in the sense of wells and springs) independently.

The title essay, "The Way of Ignorance," first written as a conference paper for the Land Institute, Marfield Green, Kansas, is about "our old friend hubris, ungodly ignorance disguised as godly arrogance. Ignorance plus arrogance plus greed sponsors 'better living with chemistry,' and produces the ozone hole and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico." The thesis is that there is a congenital human ignorance and a a willful ignorance of our own ignorance (theologians would speak of original sin) that makes one shudder at the thought that our response to global warming and exhaustion of fossil fuels will be to build many, many more nuclear reactors. Having seen what gets "skipped" or "done poorly" at too many construction sites, Tumbledown has to agree that nuclear physics "'applied' by ignorant arrogance resembles much too closely an automobile being driven by a six-year-old boy or a loaded pistol in the hands of a monkey." All of that is on the first page of this dynamite essay that rings the changes on what we don't (and can't) know and why we should respect our limits. "The Purpose of a Coherent Community" is mostly a lament that we no longer have one. "Quantity vs. Form" is another demonstration that we transgress our limits at our peril--at the peril of appropriate human scale and a propriety of technological application. Medicine should be practiced by human standards (not by the standards of what machines can do). The same goes for agriculture. Limitless production is not a good thing. Limits provide the "formal completeness, grace, and beauty" of a part related to the whole. "Renewing Husbandry" is again a caution against boasting of "technological feats that will 'feed the world.'" Husbandry, according to Berry is the more comprehensive term; science the narrower, more specialized term. (Husbandry includes science.) Yet more is claimed for the much narrower science than the more comprehensive husbandry would ever dare claim. "The Burden of the Gospels" was of special interest to Tumbledown (a professional interest). It is heartening to see such straightforward readings of Scripture--especially the rejection of interpretations that come "perilously close to 'He didn't really mean it'" (Luke 14:26).

Part III consists of a letter by Berry to Daniel Kemmis (former Minority Leader and Speaker of the House in Montana, and mayor of Missoula), a reply from Kemmis to Berry. Both essays are worth reading if readers already care about the Democratic Party. If not, don't bother. The best essay of this final section is Courtney White's "The Working Wilderness: A Call for a Land Health Movement." Courtney is not predictably on any side except the side that offends both ranchers and environmentalists (and therefore probably best protects the land).

All in all, an awesome read. A book to read a second time (or at least major sections of it). A book to provoke thought. (And shouldn't every book be that?)

100 Mile Diet: Food for Thought

2007-09-17T16:25:00.000-07:00

Tumbledown's summer reading list had a lot to do with eating. It began with Barbara Kingsolver's recounting of her family's year of eating locally (with help in the telling from her husband Steven L. Hopp and daughter Camille Kingsolver). The strength and also the weakness of the book was ease of reading. The access point for entry was the lowest common denominator of mass market appeal. But that also makes for good summer beach reading. (Not that Tumbledown went to the beach this summer, and had he gone, this book would have compounded his sense of guilt for having used the fuel and for having eaten his share of industrial fast food along the way.)

Kingsolver recounts what is becoming a popular and oft repeated experiment in eating (living, really), in which a person or couple or family decides to feed themselves food "from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it." (p. 10) The recipes for that year-long experiment, many of which can be had for free at the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle web site, are worth the price of the book. (Also available at that site is an index of non-Kingsolver web sites and other online resources, many of which are also listed in the various chapters of the book.) Tumbledown's family especially appreciates the new "Friday night pizza" ritual that grew out of the chapter entitled "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast." We are now imitating Kingsolver's example--and the fun of gathering the family around the table to put together our two 12" masterpieces of gustatory delight has become a weekly event likely to be repeated every week until the children leave the nest. The ingredients for our pizza toppings come fresh from the garden on the day we eat them, washed and chopped minutes before they hit the crust. The children see the journey from garden to mouth and participate fully along the way. Thanks to Kingsolver for the recipe and the suggestion that "family night" include food preparation and conversation about the sources of what we put in our mouths.

The final criticism, if indeed that is what it is, would be that sometimes the book comes across as "preachy." But that too is OK in a sermon, even one about the evils of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs, where animals are confined in feedlots), the fuel cost of transporting food across the nation and across the world, and the broken economics of farming.

If Kingsolver's book is preachy, Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is pedantic ("teachy" in the monotone professorial sense) and inflammatory (referring in part to his attention-grabbing accusation that McDonald's McNuggets have as an ingredient tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), "a form of butane (i.e., lighter fluid)" (p. 187). Subtitled " A Natural History of Four Meals," the book is a Jeremiad (OK, he does sermonize) against monocrop corn and soybeans and (you guessed it) CAFOs. The four meals are 1) Industrial Food, 2) Pastoral Food: Whole Foods / Big Organic, 3) Pastoral Food: Small Organic, diversified and local, 4) Personal: Hunter / Gatherer. Many of the same concerns that animate Kingsolver's experiment also inform Pollan's work, which was published a year before Kingsolver's. And Pollan, for all his story-telling ability, also likes to pack the chapters with data and citations. Pollan's telling of the history of the organic movement and description of the differences between the new "industrial organic" and the more sustainable organic of smaller farms is a tribute to good research and writing. And the basic premise, the "omnivore's dilemma" about what to eat (because an omnivore cannot eat just the leaves of a eucalyptus) is robust enough to bear the explanatory weight of the book. Overall, very well done, despite some well-publicized controversy over some of the data. (But in a book that seeks to influence as well as inform, the overreaching of a datum or two is to be expected.)

Another book that partakes of what Pollan calls an "edible conceit" (an artificial set of rules for eating--a hyper-cultivation of a convention--for the sake of the art, in this case a book, and that moves well beyond what the author would naturally do), is the book Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. It too tells the story of a year-long experiment in eating by one couple. Smith and MacKinnon's one "ironclad" rule was that "every product we bought had to come from within 100 miles." The point of the conceit, then, was "to explore, and explore deeply, the idea of local eating." (pp. 10-11) Unlike Kingsolver's and Pollan's books, which are experiments that feature the culture and foods of the Midwest and Southeast, Smith and MacKinnon's "local"-ity is foreign to Tumbledown. They live on the West Coast, the Pacific coast, west of the Cascades, in a land of mild winters and lots of rain. For that reason, the book was of interest conceptually, but hardly as informative for purposes of imitation. Still, it was an inspiration to read the story of this "conceit" and contemplate such a journey for ourselves. Just where would a family in Indianapolis draw the line on buying local food? In the flat Midwest corn belt, is local the Ohio border? (100 miles) Chicago? (200 miles) or Des Moines? (500 miles) ...or could it be that the circle around Indianapolis could be drawn more closely?

Why bother? That's the question asked once again toward the end of Plenty. The answer, in part, is the same in each of the above-mentioned books, because the average food item travels 1500 miles from farm to plate in North America. And, as Pollan says, along the way, it "has come to require a ramarkable amount of expert help" to determine where its origins are. "How did we ever get to a point," Pollan asks, "where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from...?" How indeed?

If you and your family are thinking of embarking on one of these "edible conceits," Tumbledown thinks you'll need a new cookbook for eating what's fresh and local when it is in season. (Don't look for fresh raspberries in Indianapolis in December!) The best one Tumbledown has seen is Simply in Season. It is a sequel to the much-loved More-with Less, and now comes with a study guide. (What's a conceit if you cannot study what you eat? ...that's the point, right?) The sections are arranged (you guessed it) by what is fresh in season (or, in winter, what is available because it has been canned, frozen, or otherwise locally procured and preserved).

Don't Breathe the Popcorn! ...and Don't Inhale the McNuggets.

2007-09-06T16:52:00.000-07:00

On April 26, 2002 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) noted in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) that eight workers had developed a "respiratory illness resembling bronchiolitis obliterans" after working for 8-9 years at the same popcorn factory in Missouri. This was a 5- to 11-fold increase over expected rates of respiratory problems in workers attributable to exposure to toxins in the work place. The air in the plant was tested for diacetyl, "a ketone with butter-flavor characteristics," and found to range from 18 ppm to 1.3 ppm in the parts of the plant where the affected patients had worked. (There are no guidelines as to safe levels.) Obviously, causation is difficult to establish with certainty. But wouldn't you think someone in the agency that recommended "half-face, non-powered respirators equipped with P-100 filters and organic vapor cartridges" to protect workers at that popcorn plant in 2002 might have thought to ask the question whether consumers should be warned not to breathe deeply as they pull apart the corners of the microwave popcorn bag to let the steam escape? How many ppm of diacetyl are in that steam? Anyone care to measure?

Thanks to David Michaels (The Pump Handle), the world now knows that Dr. Cecile Rose, the chief occupational and environmental medicine physician at National Jewish Medical and Research Center, informed the FDA, CDC, EPA and OSHA--because they cannot, or will not, connect the dots themselves--that there might be a danger to consumers as well as workers.

Why is there diacetyl in Tumbledown's popcorn? Because there is no butter or salt in Tumbledown's house? No. Because diacetyl is required to preserve the popcorn in the waxed paper bag inside the plastic cover inside the cardboard box from spoiling before Tumbledown eats it? No. Given the modern wonders of the microwave oven, you could leave that popcorn in its husk on the cob for a very long time, a year and more, until you put it in a dish in the microwave. You could pop the corn right off that cob if you really wanted to--no additives, no preservatives. The diacetyl is simply there to fool Tumbledown into thinking that the popcorn is "buttery." It is there to provide the generic "butter-like" taste that makes the corn addictive. It is there to make the popcorn "More Buttery!" In other words, the diacetyl is there to legitimate the $31.60 price of a box of Pop Secret. (Pop Secret Popcorn, Jumbo Butter, 6-Count Packages, Pack of 8, corn for which the farmer may receive $3 per bushel.) Silly Tumbledown. He thought the diacetyl might have a legitimate function. So much for "value added."

The same could be said for the tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) and the dimethylpolysiloxene in Chicken McNuggets. (See Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which set off an internet furor over the comment that McNuggets contain "a form of butane.") Maybe these things will not kill you, at least not immediately or in such minuscule quantities, but do you really want them added to your food on purpose? (The ultimate purpose in these cases being to enhance the corporation's bottom line, not to enhance the health-improving qualities of the eater's meal [nor even to improve that dubious category known as value-added taste].) Of course McDonald's Inc. wouldn't poison us on purpose, but do you really want to assume that they've thoroughly tested the "health benefits" of all the chemicals they add? (You can't properly call them "ingredients" when they've never before been used for food in the history of humankind.) No. Of course McDonald's doesn't test every chemical independently. They depend on the FDA, CDC, EPA and OSHA for that. Is it labeled "nontoxic" and without a limit for exposure or consumption? Then it must be good enough to eat!

Yes, Tumbledown knows that every bite of tomato he ate this summer was loaded with "chemicals." Thankfully, they weren't chemicals that Tumbledown sprinkled on. There was no need to improve the taste of 'maters fresh from the vine. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my food au naturel. ...more or less.

Tumbledown Farm

Slow Road: The Increasing Appeal of Amish Life

2007-08-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

After years of reading Gene Logsdon's paeans to Amish economics, traditional culture and community ethic, Tumbledown decided he just had to experience Holmes County, Ohio for himself. So Tumbledown and his significant other (Mrs. Tumbledown) made their way in early August to the edge of the "epicenter of the largest concentration of the Amish in the world," the town of New Bedford in Coshocton County, Ohio ("A Horse-drawn Economy" in Living at Nature's Pace: Farming and the American Dream). Tumbledown will report on the not-insignificant communities of Amish that make their home in Elkhart and LaGrange counties in Indiana (and Rush County, a little closer to home) in later posts, but he starts reporting today at Amish home base (if you do not count a trip at another time of life to the original Amish country, Lancaster County, PA).

While on this pilgrimage to examine the way one community has put real world clothes onto ideal commitments (to God, family, and land), Tumbledown read the following books that he commends to anyone interested in learning more about the Amish way of life:

Amish Society by John A. Hostetler

Great Possessions : An Amish Farmer's Journal by David Kline

A History of the Amish, Revised and Updated! by Steven M. Nolt

In addition, Tumbledown discovered the following resources for Amish products, services, and news:

First and foremost, The Budget, a newspaper established in 1890 that serves the Sugarcreek area (in its local edition) and (in its national and international edition) the Amish and Mennonite communities throughout the Americas. The rest are all a distant second to The Budget, including Country Roads and City Streets (The Times Reporter), and The Vendor (Green Valley Printing, 33477 SR206, Brinkhaven, OH 43006. 330-276-6508).

As you might expect him to, Tumbledown took special notice of the small farms (usually 100 acres or less, because the energy for their motive power comes from the sun in the form of horses), diversified farms [in the famous lines of Sir Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (Special Rodale Press Edition), farms with livestock and mixed crops where vegetable and animal wastes are returned to the ground to preserve fertility], and farms that are close enough to one another for the inhabitants to form well-populated, stable farming communities.

From Ohio Amish Co...

It was especially gratifying to see horse-drawn mowers and balers in the hay fields, and to see up close how shocks of wheat are left to dry before being loaded onto carts and hauled away for threshing and winnowing. To see a living, thriving community where these skills (and tools) are being used on a daily basis gives Tumbledown some hope that we, "the English," will go to school on another, more sustainable, way of working and living--and that there will be Amish sources for much-needed, newly manufactured hand tools and horse-drawn machinery when the time comes to seek them out.

From Ohio Amish Co...

Tumbledown was impressed with the selection of ingredients for cooking (this is Whole Foods, whole grains, fresh produce and the like, but without the industrialized baggage of the suburban chain store) available at the ubiquitous farm-based bulk food stores and the road-side and farm stands. But Tumbledown also noticed what most tourists to Amish Country see first, a thriving culture for the learning and producing of traditional arts and crafts, an artisans' community of hand-made household items like quilts and brooms and furniture. These are home-based "factories," in the old sense of places where things are made. Thus farmers and other "producers" live and work side by side, with gardens and barns and fields at small, irregular intervals between them.

And, of course, Tumbledown noticed all the buggy and wagon and bicycle traffic. That's what creates, even for the visitor, a slower pace to life. The refusal to own and operate cars for regular transportation is a key to the difference that we all notice as we drive our cars through Amish country. There are other keys, the lack of connection to "the grid," the limitation of education to the basics of the 8th grade, and a willingness to abide by a communal code of dress and mode of living.

But despite the attractions, nagging questions remain to be answered for Tumbledown. Can similarly sustainable communities be established and continue that exhibit a diversity of religious commitments (or no religious commitment at all) as opposed to what appears to be an Amish "religious monoculture" (or a sodality of religious monocultures)? Can a traditional community be established without hierarchical (and, specifically patriarchal) structures prevailing to the detriment of half the population? One might argue that such a community could evolve if many individuals (or nuclear families) were to choose independently to embrace such a mode of living with their own personalized rules or "orders," but it is precisely the lack of extended family and community support (and enforcement, or at least reinforcement) for such decisions and help with and provision of the models and tools for such living that are sorely lacking. Families and individuals could make these decisions perhaps, if there were communities of support already, but it seems problematic in the extreme to consider the formation of such communities where they do not already exist. Dropping out of the larger society is not exactly community formation. One can only hope (and Tumbledown does) that the ease of community-formation in cyberspace will enable us to put localized flesh-and-bones on new trial communities that aim at a new (old) way of living.

Can the community continue to outrun the pursuit of "development" and higher land prices? Can the community survive the onslaught of kitsch and commodity-fication of their own culture?

From Ohio Amish Co...

(e.g., the Guggisberg cheese factory tells its story of Amish farmers bringing their milk to the back door in buggies [?], cheese that is available at the local Indianapolis Meier store in the dairy case in the produce section. It surely came to Indy in a refrigerated diesel truck.)

From Ohio Amish Co...

Will the Amish remain true to their values and continue their beneficial engagement with and witness to the industrial society that surrounds them? Tumbledown was somewhat dismayed to find that one of his favorite mail order catalog stores, Lehman's, was in fact playing an ambiguous role in mediating the values of the Amish (and traditional living) while at the same time very much playing up the tourist destination that it has become, restaurant and Wal-Mart mall-sized "mom-and-pop hardware store" included. Some of the products in the store were disappointing and seemed more designed for dress-up, play-time traditional rather than for the rough and tumble of real-world manual labor.

From Ohio Amish Co...

On the way home to Indy, Tumbledown stopped at the site of another "traditional" manufacture, the Longaberger basket factory and company headquarters. Again he marveled at the expensive prices on largely ornamental and nostalgia-inducing items. Can hand-crafted quality be had ever again without the boutique price and Disney-theme-park-ification? Just give me a good, strong, hand-made working basket without the smell of potpourri or the premium charged for the boutique experience. Couldn't we all use a good basket rather than the plastic carriers we've learned to hate, then break with light use, then throw away? Give me something to feel good about gathering garden produce in, something that can take some abuse outdoors and still be in use a generation or two from now. And do it without charging enough to keep this corporate monstrosity afloat.

From Ohio Amish Co...

I guess I'll be searching The Budget for an Amish basket maker in Indiana, someone whose workshop is steps from home, and garden, and barn.

Tumbledown would be remiss if he were to close the post without thanking his hosts, Dan and Nancy Lembke, program directors for A Valley View Inn, part of the Pastors Retreat Network. If you know a pastor who could use a week of spiritual renewal in Amish country, point the pastor and spouse to www.pastorsretreatnetwork.org. The stay is free for pastors (and spouses) in full time Christian ministry. The food is great (and Amish) and the leaders wonderfully down to earth (but also also spiritually minded). The library of Christian resources for ministry is strong and well focused for a week of retreat. Do your pastor and your congregation a favor by telling your pastor about this opportunity for spiritual rest and renewal.

From Ohio Amish Co...

Tumbledown Farm

Missouri Day Trip: Agricultural Museum

2007-07-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

Tumbledown did far too much traveling and far too little gardening this summer. Two of those trips took him home to Northwest Tennessee via Southern Illinois and Southeast Missouri. On one of those trips he was fortunate enough to discover the Southeast Missouri Agricultural Museum in Bertrand, Missouri (Southeast Missouri Bootheel, just north of New Madrid and east of Sikeston).

The museum is conveniently located near the intersection of I-57 and I-55.

Though much of the machinery in the building is poorly labeled, poorly sorted, and unrestored--and none appears to be used even for demonstration purposes--the display is well worth the modest price of admission ($5 per person) for the antique farm machinery enthusiast. The importance of the collection has also come to the attention of the National Park Service, as the listing in the Draft Heritage Study demonstrates.

Tumbledown hopes that the collection will be made available to persons who are interested in studying, copying and restoring these valuable parts of our heritage and for use at working "living history" farms and demonstration projects.

Address:

Route 1, Box 875

Bertrand, MO 63823

Phone: (573) 471-3945

Hours:

9-4 Mon.-Sat.

1-4 Sun.

The owners boast that they have under one roof "Missouri's largest agricultural museum with over 6,000 pieces of antique farm machinery," in addition to the grounds, where visitors will find two log cabins, one wooden railroad caboose, and a relocated railroad depot.

Readers interested in finding out more about now-antique farm machinery when it was "state of the art," can view sketches and descriptions in the article on crop management in the Cyclopedia of American Agriculture. Those readers interested in commercial collectors' information about vintage farm equipment, see the Farm Collector.

Tumbledown Farm